Congress’ power plays

Our opinion: Congress needs to support wind power, not keep leaving the industry dangling while it doles out billions for fossil fuels.

A savvy shopper with an eye on the household budget knows that items need to be both nice and necessary before going in the cart.

Congress sure gets the nice part of that equation, raking in millions in political giving from the oil and gas industry while doling out billions to it annually in tax breaks.

What it clearly doesn’t understand is what’s necessary. Again, Congress has allowed a tax credit for the wind industry to expire. Every time this Production Tax Credit has been allowed to evaporate — as it has four times since 2000 — installations have dropped precipitously.

Yet, oil and gas chugs along, getting more than $470 billion in the past century, according to a Mother Jones analysis earlier this month.

The difference between the two industries is that tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industries are written into the tax code, while those for renewables live on a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on Congress to get its act together long enough to extend the subsidies.

That simply doesn’t make sense at a time when it’s critical for our long-term energy and climate needs for renewable energy to be nurtured.

Look at New York’s own Draft Energy Plan, on which the state is taking comment until the month’s end. It emphasizes increasing reliance on renewable sources like wind to 30 percent and recognizes that onetime subsidies can’t sustain long-term development of this form of power.

Skeptics of the value of wind energy should consider that earlier this year, after the first record-breaking cold snap, the New York Independent System Operator, a not-for-profit that manages the state’s electrical grid, highlighted available wind power as helping meet demand.

Yet, as the Times Union’s Brian Nearing found late last year as the wind tax credit was expiring, development of wind already was taking a hit due to the uncertainty of the available federal funds. As of October 2013, there were 27 wind projects expected to connect to the grid. Yet, only one was proposed in 2013.

Clearly, Congress is listening to the more than $70 million spent on political giving by the oil and gas industry in 2012, according to the Mother Jones analysis. Compare that to less than $10 million from the renewables sector. Meanwhile that year, oil and gas interests spent nearly $150 million on federal lobbying while the renewables industry spent about $25 million.

Congress needs to stop thinking about its campaign war chest and think about taxpayers’ money and citizens’ desires and long-term interests. Two-in-three Americans want the United States to pursue more solar energy, according to a Gallup poll, and another 71 percent favor further development of wind power.

Renewable energy is no longer just a “nice” option. It’s necessary to the nation’s future.

Charlie’s is a typical short sighted right wing response. Not one negative word about the $470 billion dollars given to the oil industry, much of it continuing long after the industry had learned how to turn a profit on its own, but let’s cut off the wind industry at its knees, an industry that’s being undermined at every turn by the much wealthier oil industry and the politicians beholden to them. How about we level the playing field instead, or better yet, reverse it? Eliminate all tax subsidies to the oil industry and give the money instead to the wind and solar industry. Renewables are the future. The sooner the politicians recognize that, and spends its subsidies on intelligent, clean, forward thinking energies, the better off we’ll all be.

I for one hate those wind turbines, they are ugly, noisy, and way to inefficient. However I do like solar, it is clean, quiet, and can be installed pretty much anywhere that has sunlight. The problem here is the building codes departments of communities. They don’t take into consideration energy production/consumption when approving housing or commercial building projects. Case in point….over 90% of new buildings are built to accommodate forced hot air heat/AC, forced hot air is the least efficient way to heat a building, radiant heat is much better, healthier and more cost effective in the long run. But because the forced hot air/AC is the cheapest to install that’s the one they go with. Short sightedness by government agencies and the building trades. get them on board and you solve the energy problem altogether.

Or we could stop giving corporate welfare to the fossil fuel industry, stop giving corporate welfare to the wind industry, and and stop giving corporate welfare to every other industry period. Then companies could just compete on a level playing field and succeed or fail based solely on relative performance in providing the products and services society wants and needs. They wouldn’t engage in the poltical gift giving you deplore because they wouldn’t expect to get anything in return. The economy would function better and we’d get big money out of politics.

To replace one big nuke plant with wind turbines, you need about 120 square miles. That’s a square about 11 miles on a side. Your typical oil-, coal-, or natural gas-fueled electric generation station does not have quite as large an output as a big nuke, so you could get by with 10%-25% less land consumption – say, 100 square miles… How many coal/oil/gas/nuke plants you wanna’ replace???

P.S. – What do you think the tree-huggin’ crowd is gonna’ have to say about covering hundreds of square miles of land with wind turbines? And what do you think the animal activists are going to say about that many wind turbines – do you know them wind turbines kill birds?

OK how about we check another information source, Forbes Magazine, which says when they do the numbers that renewables receive 25x the subsidies that fossil fuels get when the baseline is units of energy produced:

If the TU wants to be taken seriously as a source of opinion, please stop presenting a complex subject like energy with such cartoon-like simplicity. And please stop citing Mother Jones as an authority unless it’s a subject they know like grading different sources of ganja…..